The management of people is as a key factor that contributes to the success of projects at any level in an organization. Part III includes topics from prominent authors from areas that are allied to OPM, such as sociology, psychology, and human resource management, where the authors discuss various aspects of people and their activities in OPM.
Part III starts with Chapter 11 “Human Resource Management in Organizational Project Management: Current Trends and Future Prospects” by Anne Keegan, Martina Huemann, and Claudia Ringhofer. Their chapter discusses recent research linking HRM and OPM to identify key themes that differentiate HRM at a project level from OPM at an organizational level. The authors also identify current gaps in research related to HRM and OPM and propose a research agenda that would help in enhancing the OPM capability of an organization.
This is followed by Chapter 12, “Stakeholders” by Pernille Eskerod, who highlights the importance of changing the approach for dealing with stakeholders in an OPM environment. She proposes a stakeholder-centric approach in dealing with a network of stakeholders, which is more effective in an OPM environment, as opposed to a project-centric approach that focuses narrowly on the relations between a project and its stakeholders at the project level.
Chapter 13 deals with another important aspect of the people aspect of OPM – leadership. Ralf Müller, Johan Packendorff, and Shankar Sankaran emphasize the need for a balanced attitude to leadership in an OPM context in this chapter, “Balanced Leadership: A New Perspective for Leadership in Organizational Project Management,” by proposing the need for a balance between the leadership of a vertical leader (at management level) and horizontal leaders (at team level). They propose a four-step process, outlining the intra- and interpersonal activities for vertical and horizontal leaders at each of these steps.
This chapter is followed by a discussion on teams in the context of OPM, “Project Teams and Their Role in Organizational Project Management.” Nathalie Drouin and Shankar Sankaran argue in Chapter 14 that while the project management literature has focused on studying teams within projects, we also need to consider the relationship between functional teams and project teams in an OPM environment as there will be need for cross-functional collaboration.
Managing knowledge acquired and created by people for organizational purposes is another key aspect of OPM. This is illustrated in Chapter 15 by Ed Hoffman and Jon Boyle, “REAL Knowledge at NASA: A Knowledge Services Model for the Modern Project Environment.” It describes how knowledge management is implemented in NASA to create an effective project environment in the context of OPM.
Julien Pollack argues that we need to examine the different roles that change management plays in OPM as opposed to the basic process of delivering a project technically in Chapter 16, “Change Management as an Organizational Project Capability.” He argues that a fundamentally different approach is required to successfully implement change management at an organizational level, which will need engagement and emergence as opposed to the current control-focused view used in managing change in projects.
In Chapter 17, “The Behavioral ‘Glue’ in OPM: A Review of Productive Behaviors of Project Team Members,” Timo Braun discusses the behaviors required in OPM. The chapter discusses four types of antecedents required for productive behavior: trust, culture, team characteristics, and environmental conditions. It also proposes a research agenda to carry out interdisciplinary research in OPM.
Following a discussion on behavioral aspects, Chivonne Algeo and Julia Connell propose the establishment of special interest groups within industry clusters to facilitate knowledge sharing – an innovation to contribute to the theory and practice of OPM – in Chapter 18, “Developing Organizational Project Management Competencies through Industry Clusters.”
The eight chapters in Part III cover an array of interdisciplinary concepts and strategies that can help to increase the capability of OPM in an organization to successfully deliver its strategies.
